There was a custom among the Mordwines to put a club
into the coffin with the corpse, to enable him to drive away the
watch-dogs at the gate of the nether world.[20] The Mordwines, however,
have borrowed much of their mythology from the Iranians. The Hurons and
Iroquois told the early missionaries that after death the soul must
cross a deep and swift river on a bridge formed by a single slender
tree, where it had to defend itself against the attacks of a dog.[21] No
sane ethnologist or philologer will insist that all these conceptions
are related _genetically_, that there is nothing accidental in the
repetition of the idea. The dog is prominent in animal mythology; one of
his functions is to watch. It is quite possible, nay likely, that a
dog, pure and simple, has strayed occasionally into this sphere of
conceptions without any further organic meaning--simply as a baying,
hostile watch-dog. But we cannot prove anything by an ignorant _non
possumus_; the conception _may_, even if we cannot say _must_, after all
in each case, have been derived from essentially the same source: the
dead journeying upward to heaven interfered with by a coursing heavenly
body, the sun or the moon, or both.
Pages:
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45